How to Outsmart Your Competitors at SEO

How do you cut your way through all the noise and competition and stand out from other SEO companies in the market? Simple: develop better SEO and online marketing strategies. Outsmart your biggest SEO competitor today and make them irrelevant by following these tips.

Talk to Your Clients

The biggest mistake your competitors make is not to communicate with clients effectively. If you’re not yet talking to your clients enough, break the bad habit and open those communication lines. Ask about their specific needs, their business goals, and their requirements. In return, give them regular progress updates and comprehensive reports detailing your work. The most successful SEO companies are transparent about their methodology and their progress.

Ensure that you maintain constant communication with your clients by scheduling weekly (if they have the time) and monthly updates. The weekly updates can be done over the phone or through video conferencing, and it only has to be a few minutes – just give them an overview of what’s going on. Having monthly comprehensive reporting meetings are ideal for most clients. It does not consume too much time, and you can easily keep them in the loop on their campaign progress. Talking to your clients will play a huge part in the following items in this list – remember to integrate communication in your SEO company culture from the very beginning.

Offer Something New and Unique

Do not simply follow what your competitors are doing. It will put your SEO business on the same level as them, but never ahead. You need to give your clients something that they have not seen before. I’ve mentioned many times before that you need to innovate consistently. It is very important to stress this point because once you have a solution that is unique only to your company, people will naturally gravitate towards what you offer.

A good example of this is your white label dashboard. With this tool, you can offer your clients something that they will not get anywhere else – real-time ranking updates and scraped data from Google. This is value and technology your clients will not find anywhere else. Think out of the box and come up with new solutions to old problems.

Educate Your Audience

Your competitors are spending thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns and sponsoring events just to promote their brand. Be smarter than these companies by using your knowledge. Attract followers and convert them to customers by educating them on online marketing and SEO. Sharing your knowledge and teaching your audience has the following benefits:

It adds fresh content to your site, keeping you relevant and updated on the SERPs; and

It won’t cost you anything if you have a blog or another existing online publishing platform that you update regularly.

Find out what your visitors are most interested to learn about through other channels and by studying your website analytics. Use this as your starting point when developing your educational content calendar.

Gamify Your Landing Page

Make your landing pages more interesting and keep your audience coming back with the help of gamification. Landing page gamification is the process of applying gaming concepts to your landing page. Its aim is to improve user experience and get more people to fulfill your desired action.

You’re probably already doing things that count under gamification. For example, having a rewards system and telling your customers they will get a specific amount of reward in exchange of a product or service purchase is gamification. This gives users a reason to keep visiting your site and to fulfill your desired action: to sign up, to check in, to download, whatever your goal may be. Foursquare is a good example of this. They make checking into and adding local venues on their database more fun by offering different badges. They also keep users coming back by offering different kinds of rewards for a user’s first check-in on a partner location.

You could use this concept and offer rewards and recognition every time someone signs up for your services or orders your products. Another – and a simpler – way to do this is to add graphic features that tell you exactly where you are in the process (downloading research, signing up for services, or getting a freebie). This encourages your visitors to stay on the page and complete the process, therefore adding to your conversions.

Use Silo SEO Structure

Make it easier for people to find exactly what they need on your site. Follow a silo SEO structure if you have a static website. This strengthens the link profile of your homepage and makes finding information easy by grouping pages according to categories. It also allows you to offer audiences more information on a specific topic because you dedicate an entire page to a single topic.

Executed properly, you get the following benefits:

You gain more visibility on the SERPs because of your strong link profile;

You get more possible landing pages for your paid ad campaigns;

You position yourself as a leader by sharing complete information about each solution you offer; and

You make it easier for visitors to browse your site and make decisions faster.

Make sure to provide quality content and use your keyword sparingly. Keep the levels under three or four to make it easier for both your visitors and search engine bots to browse your site and go through all the silo pages.

Have an Integrated Marketing Strategy

Set yourself apart from your competition by having an integrated marketing strategy. Make sure all your marketing efforts – SEO, PPC, retargeting, social, local search – complement and support each other. For example, your retargeting and PPC campaigns can be used to lead traffic to a page you want your visitors to focus on, pages that may not necessarily be highlighted by your SEO campaigns alone. Examine your goals and see how each marketing strategy you use can reinforce or improve the results that come from your other strategies.

Having an integrated marketing strategy makes your campaign more focused, making it easier to achieve your desired conversions. You will be more effective at gathering and nurturing leads, finding marketing and growth opportunities, and knowing more about your audience when you have a well-planned, well-organized cross-channel marketing strategy. You can check my previous blog for more information on cross-channel marketing and integrating your marketing strategy.

Challenge the Status Quo with Movement Marketing

This is related to the first item, save one major difference: here, instead of you making the change, you encourage your audience to take action. The biggest marketing campaigns are movements that challenge what is generally accepted. Good examples are Volkswagen’s “Think Small” campaign, where they introduced the concept that smaller is better when it comes to cars; Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” campaign, where they show how tough their product is by blending different objects like electronics in their blender; and Grasshopper.com’s “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World” campaign.

Don’t be afraid to challenge what is accepted today and introduce your own ideas to your market. Change the way they view SEO and online marketing and encourage them to shift to more innovative ideas and methodology. A great way of doing this is by creating your own SEO manifesto based on your observations of the industry.

Talk to your account manager today for assistance on implementing these in your SEO company. Don’t forget to sign up for a free account if you’re not yet our partner to get started. I’ll be back again soon for more updates and tips on SEO so visit our blog soon!

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